Regarding travel, I think it is a bit of a cultural thing. I have heard that somone commuting to work in the USA will drive for 1, 2, even 3 hours (each way) being not uncommon, whereas I can't think of many people in the UK who commute for much more than an hour (I walk to work in about 15 minutes, but I'm on the lower end of the range), and most of the longer communtes seem to be commuting to London, which makes sense as there are a lot of ways to get into London (by train, it's easier for me to get to London from Luton than it is to say, Chesham, which is geographically closer).

I think lots of good things have come from this discussion. The main point would seem to be the need for a central forum to unite and galvanise the UK playerbase. The problem I see is that there are already a few forums set up for this and knowing the UK magic players collective ability to swallow pride and adjust his/her attitude to where they should post is somewhere around the lower end of not going to happen I have no idea how to move forward with that. I am saddened that we are likely to remain fragmented unless things change.

Yea, the forums thing is a real issue - the only people who have a really incentive and enough time to set one up are the traders, but then we'll end up with 4/5 of them, each mostly populated by locals...

Since this article went up today, I've received a call from WotC UK, who've given me some more information on the London Games Club situation - The reason there was no pre-release there was not due to a lack of affiliation with a store, but rather a misunderstanding about the affiliation which had existed for the previous pre-release, and the fact one was applied for after the scheduling deadline and product for the UK had been ordered.

Obviously this means portions of my article are now quite inaccurate, and I'd like to apologise for anyone who feels at all misled by statements made in it - I wrote it based entirely on the facts I had available to me at the time, which it now appears were incomplete